Last year, with my two teenage daughters, I walked the length of Extremadura, from south to north, while doing the pilgrimage route Camino Via de la Plata from Seville to Santiago de Compostela, a distance of over 800 kilometres which took us eight weeks to complete.On our return I bored my wife with so many tales of towns previously unheard of such as Mérida, Cáceres, Plasencia that she eventually raised a sceptical eye and said she had better go and see them for herself.
I vividly remember having a breakfast of Torta del Casar (well known Spanish cheese), Jamón Ibérico and café con leche in a café, in the small town of Casar de Cáceres where the cheese is made. This name Casar de Cáceres jumped at me from the computer screen earlier on this year with the web site of Hendrik Berends: www.extremadura-country-homes.com.
After a few initial exchanges of email with Hendrik, we jumped in the car, dropped a perpendicular to Biarritz and then headed down to Extremadura - the most wonderful drive which I would recommend to anyone.
Once in Plasencia, some 80 kms North of Cáceres city, we hooked up with Hendrik who arranged to meet us the following day and take us on a tour of the de la Vera valley. While Hendrik may try and sell you on the laid back quiet sleepy approach to life in Extremadura, this is not a policy he personally subscribes to when showing his clients around.
The tempo of the next three days was such that it would make a Wall Street lawyer plead for time out. And we have lived in Manhattan.
It was a blur of driving around vast tracts of nature-rich Cáceres province, seeing from fincas to building plots, with innumerable stops in bars and restaurants, while he introduced us to a mind-numbing range of people whom he knew on a first name basis, including: Mayors, restaurateurs, garage owners, hoteliers, pharmacists, a cheese factory owner, public functionaries of all kinds, the list goes on.
There is no doubt that without Hendrik’s help we would not have seen or understood as much of Cáceres province as we did.
He also very quickly and efficiently took us through all the steps needed for purchasing from a car to a property in Spain, by presenting us to an excellent english-speaking lawyer in Cáceres city, assisted us with opening our Spanish non-resident bank account and even put us into touch with trustworthy architects. We are now planning to build our own home in Cáceres province.
Hendrik’s fee was well worth it.
Guy & Gill Thornton
October 7th, 2007